


Kissing Cousins

by crossingwinter



Series: ASOIAF Drabbles & Ficlets [11]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 19:59:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>God, Freud would have loved reading her case file.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kissing Cousins

She didn’t see him very often growing up.  It didn’t surprise her, of course.  Grams and Dany and Viserys lived in Atlanta—halfway across the country—and Grams hated flying, so they never came out to Santa Fe.  Until she was sixteen, she only saw him once every few years—and only ever at Christmas and New Years, when she and Dad would fly east.  It didn’t surprise her how little she saw them.  Even with Gramps dead, Dad was so much older than his siblings, and had so much shit to work through from his own childhood.  But still…

It was better that way, she decided.  Easier.  Because Viserys was confusing.

He had a bright smile, and laughed a lot and he and Dany seemed to have far too many inside jokes for Rhaenys to feel completely comfortable when she was hanging out with them.  She wished, watching as Dany would run and jump and leap onto Viserys’ back, that she’d had a sibling, that Aegon hadn’t died of the same thing that had killed her mother and that she hadn’t spent her childhood alone in a house that was too big, chasing her cat around the kitchen when she wanted company.  She always felt selfish when she thought things like that, though.  And she certainly never said it aloud.  She didn’t want her Dad’s face to go all tight the way that it did whenever he thought about Mom and Aegon.

When she was younger, when it first started, she blamed it on her own damn loneliness.  Dad was always closeted away with Lyanna, and she was left to her own devices, feeding Balerion and imagining what life would be like if she had gritted her teeth and gone to boarding school.  When Viserys smiled and her heart beat faster, and he joked with her about how he was making it his job—nay, his duty to bring a smile to her face.  That was how that would go, right?  If you’re lonely, you get a crush on your uncle.  Especially when the uncle is only a few years older and is so startlingly blonde and his eyes are bright purple like Dad’s and not muddy brown like her own.  That’s what the books would tell her.  God, Freud would haveloved reading her case file.

And then college happened.  He’d gone to OSU, and she’d ended up at UMich two years later, and he’d let her stay over in his apartment during game weekends and they’d get shitfaced together, laughing, and she told herself that it was the alcohol—definitely the alcohol—that made her feel warm inside.  (It was definitely the alcohol that made her puke like the stupid little freshman she was all over his bathroom.  He’d held her hair back and brought her water from the sink.)  He’d send her text messages of the dumb things his physics professors would say when they were scrambling to answer questions.  She would send him pictures of the often rather explicit snow statues that people would build in front of their houses.  (His favorite was of a dragon with an erection.  She kept it saved on her phone for him.)  At his graduation, she’d tried not to cry with pride that he graduated Summa Cum Laude, and tried to play it cool in front of his friends who only remembered her from the time she’d vommed all over their house.

When Rhaenys graduated, he drew the dragon penis ice sculpture on her graduation card, much to Grams’ frustration.  Dany had been curious about it and Rhaenys realized vividly that Viserys hadn’t passed on the photo.  And suddenly she had inside jokes with Viserys.  It was a talisman during that time when nothing was safe and everything was changing, and she ended up living in Colorado, working at a windpower startup.  It was lonely and even colder and Viserys’ texts were even less frequent, because they didn’t even share the cold now that he was researching at Los Alamos.  She wondered if he saw Dad at all.  He probably didn’t.  They didn’t know each other very well.  She knew Viserys better than Dad did.

The worst was Christmas, when she couldn’t get off work.  She didn’t know why she couldn’t get off work, and decided that she should probably quit because clearly her boss was an asshole, but she needed to wait until after Christmas so she could actually pay for her Christmas gifts.  It had been a sobering realization, and without even thinking, she’d called Viserys and sobbed to him over the phone for half an hour.

The day after Christmas, he arrived in Aurora, a duffle under one arm and a bag of presents in his hand.  He’d made her open them while he lit a fire in her fireplace, and then made fun of her for the way she raised her eyebrows at Dany’s gift from her term abroad in Dubai (a belly dancing outfit in a rather lurid shade of orange), and she realized how much she’d missed him, even though this was the only time that they’d ever spent really and truly alone.

Perhaps that was a good thing.  

She couldn’t tell.

She’d never spoken to her therapist about this part of Viserys, the way his Adam’s apple bobbed as he spoke, the way his crooked smile made her breathing uneasy, the way—oh god—the way she watched his lips when he spoke.  Her therapist never asked.  He spent too much time on her father’s relationship with Lyanna.  And when she leaned over and kissed him—not on the lips, not on the cheek, but on the side of his jaw—she knew she’d either have to stop going to therapy or never see Viserys again.

He sat very still when she pulled away, his eyes wide and his eyebrows arched.  

And then his hands were in her hair and his lips were on hers and she had to be dreaming because there was no way that Viserys was as strange as she was, there was no way that this bright, clever, beautiful man could be so cruelly fucked up that he would succumb to her level of…

But he did, his hands moving from her hair to her neck to her shoulders to her waist as he pulled her closer and closer and his bright blonde hair reflected the light of the fire when she pulled away long enough to notice.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her, with nervous eyes.  His pupils were so dilated that she could hardly see the purple of his irises.

“Nothing,” she whispered, and pulled off her shirt.


End file.
